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Screening Protests Grow as Holiday Crunch Looms

WHO knows how these things gain momentum on the Internet, but there have been enough online protests against the new body imaging machines at airport checkpoints that the Transportation Security Administration’s new boss, John S. Pistole, called me on Monday to talk.

Mr. Pistole was specifically worried about the Internet-based campaign encouraging fliers who opposed the new machines to observe a “national opt-out day” on Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving. Any passenger can opt out of a scan that creates an image of the naked body and choose a full-body pat down instead. Only a tiny percentage of passengers now do, the T.S.A. says. But if enough people choose to do so on one of the busiest travel days of the year, checkpoints could become crowded and disorderly.

As any security expert knows, a chaotic checkpoint is a security problem. “If terrorists can anticipate that, it gives them an opportunity” to try to evade various layers of security by creating an incident for diversion, Mr. Pistole said. “And what would this do for travel plans for Thanksgiving? Are people going to miss flights because there are long backups, because other people are protesting?”

As if that were not trouble enough, some airline pilots are engaged in their own protests against the body imagers, which the T.S.A. is now calling advanced imaging technology. Pilots have long bristled at being subjected to intensive security when, as they point out, a pilot in control of an airplane does not need a Swiss Army knife to bring it down. Last week, the union representing 11,500 pilots at American Airlines called on members to “politely decline” screening by the “backscatter” models of the machines, the models that use X-ray technology.

The union’s main concern is the potential cumulative effects of repeated exposures to radiation. The T.S.A. cites studies showing that the effects are harmless, but other studies have challenged that conclusion. The other model of the body imagers uses millimeter-wave technology, which doesn’t raise radiation issues. There are now about 385 body imagers in place at 68 airports — 211 of them backscatters and the rest millimeter wave units. A total of 1,000 are planned by the end of 2011.

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Credit
Chris Gash

The pilots are being heard. Mr. Pistole said that the agency would meet Tuesday with pilots’ representatives and airline security officers to discuss new procedures that could allow pilots to avoid the intensive screening that passengers receive. Doing that would require a pilot to have a foolproof form of identification like cards encoded with their fingerprints and iris scan.

Judging from the intense reader reaction I’ve had on this subject, questions abound about what to expect at the checkpoint, especially as more people are now routinely being directed by screeners to use the new machines, even when an old-fashioned metal detector is available. The scanners detect anything on the body, including a slip of paper in a pocket. An alarm necessitates a pat down.

On Nov. 1, screeners began using a far more invasive form of procedure for all pat-downs — in which women’s breasts and all passengers’ genital areas are patted firmly. Since that change happened to coincide with the accelerated introduction of the body scanning machines, many fliers began expressing their dismay on blogs, fanning anti-T.S.A. reactions.

A traveler named John Tyner, for example, posted a detailed account of being detained at the San Diego airport when he tried to leave after declining a body scan. Mr. Tyner recorded the encounter, in which person who appeared to be a T.S.A. screener insisted that he undergo a “groin check.” That account, and that indelicate term, quickly went viral.

I’m getting a lot of questions about the new security regime, including some pointed ones from women. Do the imagers, for example, detect sanitary napkins? Yes. Does that then necessitate a pat-down? The T.S.A. couldn’t say. Screeners, the T.S.A. has said, are expected to exercise some discretion.

Did the T.S.A. anticipate this kind of reaction to the new measures? “We knew it would be controversial, in terms of some people not liking that combination,” he said. But, he added, “When somebody gets on a plane, they want to know that everybody else — O.K., maybe not themselves but everyone else — has been thoroughly screened.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2010, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Screening Protests Grow As Holiday Crunch Looms. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe